Only Parthasarathy did not answer Govindappa Nayakkar for he believed that it is God alone who can punish, and not man. Of course he couldn’t voice that thought for fear of being jeered at by the crowd! So he kept his mouth shut. He stayed there only as a mark of respect to the village rules. When he heard the decision he quietly walked away. Now you can see him with his thambura, strumming it, crooning a devotional hymn about Rama, slowly forgetting the world around him.

The guards brought in two carpenters as ordered. They were told to build a stake according to the instructions on its height, length and width.

There are several ways by which a person can be impaled on a stake—a method that will produce instant death; another by which the person would hang there for several days, groaning in unbearable pain, till he died. There are even various points where the stake can pierce the body and points from where it can stick out.

Twenty yards away from the salt corner in the village is a tall neem tree and beside it some open ground. They stuck the stake on that ground. After that, in an auspicious spot, they dug a pit about four feet in length. Then they rolled the woman’s corpse on the cart into the pit and laid the body on the mud pile. Achari gazed at her face for the last time.

A pregnant woman who has had an unnatural death is not buried with the foetus in the womb. They slit the stomach, take out the foetus, lay it next to her and then inter both the bodies, side by side.

And so there was a long debate. ‘Please do not harm her body. Bury her just like that,’ begged the goldsmith.

‘If we do so, then we have to plant a stone dolmen on this place,’ opined the people.

‘You can do that, can’t you? After all you are doing so much. This is very simple.’

‘Achari, we have no problem doing that. It’s just that we have to wait until you return to your town, and finish all the rituals.’

‘Return home? Who? Me? I have no home or town any more. I am a recluse. I’m going northward on a pilgrimage.’

The people could feel their eyes dampen when they heard these words.

They put the body in the pit and the goldsmith threw in three handfuls of earth, saying, ‘My dear woman, you served me food with your hands and now I am serving you mud in return.’

The others covered the pit with soil. Each spadeful fell on the body with a thuk, thuk noise. Once the pit was half full, one man jumped in, stamped the soil down and levelled it. When it was almost three-quarters full, they threw in some thorns and filled it up. This was to protect the body from being dug out by wild animals like jackals and eaten up. The pit was now fully covered and the damp patch stood apart.